In a world that is supposed to be chiefly swayed by hunger and by love Mrs. Packletide was an exception; her movements and motives were largely governed by dislike of Loona Bimberton.
And there—the final sentence of the opening paragraph—is really all the reader needs to know about the title character. Everything that follows springs forth from this particular lapse in reason, logic and character. In the paragraph which leads inexorably to this psychological insight it is learned that Loona Bimberton had taken an eleven-mile-long flight in an “aeroplane” piloted by an Algerian. This—and this alone—is the driving force behind the subsequent killing of perhaps the only defenseless tiger in Indian, a payout of thousands of rupees to the villagers in the community that tiger calls home and, eventually, the purchase and gifting of a week-end cottage. And that’s it. That is all. No deeper hidden motivations—at least none made clear—is the fuel supplying the engine which drives the narrator. Just two privileged women with too much time, too much money and too little of anything else on their hands.
She was not actually nervous about the wild beast, but she had a morbid dread of performing an atom more service than she had been paid for.
Only one person accompanies Mrs. Packletide to India to carry out her intention to kill a tiger. And the only reason Louisa does so is because she is the socialite’s “paid companion.” Oh, sure, they are friendly enough with each other and recognized as a duo about town by others, but as to whether this would still be the case were the relationship non-transactional at its foundation is anyone’s guess. Though the smart money would be on unlikely. This observation by the narrator comes at the moment immediately after which Louisa has wondered out loud if the two might actually be in some danger as they wait for the tiger to enter their trap. It is an observation sandwiched between that musing and Mrs. Packletide’s assurance that the age and infirmity of the tiger make their danger quite unlikely since Packletide is, after all, carrying serious heat. What seems a rather throwaway bit of character description intended to deepen the understanding of the relationship between the two will eventually prove to one of the most significant quotes in the entire text.
Mrs. Packletide was pardonably annoyed at the discovery; but, at any rate, she was the possessor of a dead tiger, and the villagers, anxious for their thousand rupees, gladly connived at the fiction that she had shot the beast. And Miss Mebbin was a paid companion.
The shooting expedition seems at first to have gone according to plan completely free of any ambiguous qualities which might deem it less than perfect. Except, of course, for the fact that the tiger was old and in really bad health. It is notably Louisa Mebbin who first notices and points out that what seems to have gone perfectly according to plan actually just had another potential monkey wrench thrown into the plans to reconstruct the true nature of events into a thrilling moment of dramatic tension in which lives were literally on the line. It seems that when the tiger fell over dead just a millisecond or two after the sharp report from the rifle exploded in the air, its demise was not attributed to receiving the intended bullet. That little nugget of reality hit the live goat set out as bait. The tiger, it seems, was so old and frail that the sound of the rifle engendered a massive coronary infarction which was the authentic cause of death. But, as Mrs. Packletide quickly calculates with her transactional reasoning, even this departure from the story that would become the “truth” mattered little against the economic realities of social construction.
Louisa: "How amused everyone would be if they knew what really happened.”
Mrs. Packletide: "What do you mean?"
Louisa: "How you shot the goat and frightened the tiger to death,"
Mrs. Packletide: "No one would believe it,”
Louisa: "Loona Bimberton would.”
Mrs. Packletide: "You surely wouldn't give me away?"
Louisa: "I've seen a week-end cottage near Darking that I should rather like to buy. Six hundred and eighty, freehold. Quite a bargain, only I don't happen to have the money."
See, the funny thing about transactional-based relationships is that they exist only according to the terms of the balance of leverage. Recall the rhetorical question posed earlier: would these two still be friends if Louisa didn’t money and Mrs. Packletide didn’t need to buy friendship? The answer is not exactly made clear, by the end seems the evidence is pretty solid. It is symbiotic and like any symbiotic relationship it exists only for as long as both parties have a need and opportunity to feed off one another. Still, it must be considered beyond all doubt a happy ending. Mrs. Packletide got what she wanted: extreme awkwardness on the part of Loona Bimberton in their very limited encounters with each other’s paths. And Louisa Mebbin got a fancy cottage for making her friends envious every weekend. The only loser in the entire deal is the big game hunting industry, having lost a very lucrative client forever in Mrs. Packletide.
